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Columns

Filtering by Category: El País

Five Ideas that Trump Killed

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / ​​​​​​​El País

Trump has put an end to the idea that corruption and nepotism at the highest levels of government can only flourish in banana republics

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categories El País

A Waste of the Crisis

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

The good news is that the US economy is recovering. The bad news is that, now that the crisis is easing off, the motivation to make the changes needed to stabilize America’s fiscal situation has evaporated. The imbalances between US government spending and its income will go on being problematical until reforms are made to increase the rate of saving, diminish the costs of the healthcare system, and reduce inequality in income.

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categories El País

Europe, Syria and global warming

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

What do the European economic crisis, the war in Syria and global warming all have in common? Nobody seems to have the power to stop them.

This is partly due to the fact that all three belong to a dangerous class of challenges now facing the world: problems whose solution depends on the action of several countries acting together. Such problems are not new, of course. But now they are proliferating, becoming more pernicious and complicated to solve while the capacity of countries to coordinate their efforts is declining.

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categories El País

Long live sanctions!

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

The word “sanction” is an unpleasant one. It implies the punishment that someone with power (parent, teacher, boss, judge) inflicts on someone less powerful who is forced to submit. In international relations, sanctions have a well-earned bad reputation. The more powerful nations tend to use them to force policy shifts — or even changes in leadership — in other countries. They seldom work. Instead, they tend to penalize the already-suffering population of the sanctioned country, more than the tyrants who misgovern it. The irrational and counterproductive US embargo on Cuba is a good example. The embargo, which began in 1960, has served only to give the Castro brothers half a century of excuses to justify the island’s bankruptcy. One rare and contrasting example is that of the successful sanctions on South Africa in the mid-1980s. The US Congress imposed severe economic sanctions on the country until it abolished apartheid and freed Nelson Mandela, among other conditions. Europe and Japan joined in. The embargo wreaked havoc in the South African economy, leading its government to eventually reform the segregationist laws and free Mandela. But the list of sanctions that have accomplished their stated goals is very short.

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categories El País

Who is more powerful, Merkel or Murdoch?

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

Angela Merkel is surely one of the world's most powerful people. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, is also quite powerful. Of course, their respective sources of power are very different, as are the ways in which they use the influence they have, and the objectives and interests that guide their conduct. Merkel is the leader of an important nation while Murdoch leads a large multinational corporation. Moreover, Murdoch maintains that he does not use the power of his media to pressure governments or influence politics. His critics reject this claim, and insist that Murdoch and his media properties are influential political actors. In the United States, his detractors accuse Fox News of being closely aligned with the Republican Party, and more recently a main supporter of the Tea Party.

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categories El País

The world’s most murderous people

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

It’s always the same. Somewhere in the United States a heavily armed, mentally disturbed male, kills a group of innocents. Twenty children and seven adults most recently. National grief, commotion and indignation follow, plus furious debate on gun control. Then nothing. Until a similar tragedy happens again and the cycle repeats itself. It looks like this time it will be different and hopefully, some reforms may be adopted.

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categories El País

Lifesaving missiles

Andrea G

Moisés Naím / El País

Weapons are for killing. But, surprisingly, sometimes they save lives. This is the case of the anti-missile missiles used by Israel for protection against the rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza in the recent conflict. And I don’t just mean the fact that the system, the now-famous Iron Dome, prevented the death of Israeli civilians. This it did achieve, of course. But it also prevented the death of thousands of innocent people in the Gaza Strip, stopped further destabilization of this troubled region, and possibly even prevented a dangerous armed confrontation between Israel and Egypt. How can a weapon achieve all this?

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categories El País